Building a social media marketing strategy: The six key questions to answer

In this series of Smart Insights Best Practice Advice, Danyl Bosomworth of SmartInsights.com shares tips on best practice to get better results from digital marketing. This month Danyl looks at giving social media marketing a strategic purpose.

• Get buy in from budget holder, project sponsors and senior management
• Clarity on vision, purpose and direction with business context
• Ability to scale both the size and scope of the social media programme
• Budgeting and resource management against objectives and goals, to understand the return against any other marketing activity

• Social media marketing. Whereby you’re most often reacting to the need to be using social media but nonetheless are integrating into a wider communications strategy. Reasonably advanced companies are in this space and it’s where companies investing in the future are very quickly headed. Typically this is where there’s a focus still on “campaigns” focus and how social media marketing can be integrated as a part of that, the listening and conversation is there with the consumers though the purpose remains promotional or at least very marketing orientated. The social tools and techniques have a purpose within the campaign context. Old Spice guy typifies this for me, it’s great, hugely successful and yet it still remains campaign orientated. Tools like Buddy Media for Facebook, and Hootsuite for Twitter in particular have made social campaigns easier to execute for smaller brands, teams and organisations.
• Integrated social CRM. several big brands seem to be getting really serious in this area, the focus is way beyond marketing and about the consumer and wider market interactions pre, during and post purchase. The case studies that we read about around Dell and Gatorade and their command centres, for example. Stuff of social media marketing dreams! Where the business is so customer oriented and leveraging social media to engage and interact with the consumer, marketing is but one component in meeting the consumer needs. It’s right-side-up marketing done via social media tools, what does the consumer need over what do we want to say.

• Is your strategy about brand awareness, customer engagement or sales? It can only be one of them in reality, otherwise it’s two strategies, two strategies is fine so long as you realise and resource for that – most of us are not in that space.
• What is your relationship with your intended audience? Jay suggests picking two adjacent audience types on this scale: Nothing Aware of you, but never acted Acted once Repeat actions/enthusiasts Advocates. The value in this question is significant in its simplicity I feel in how it informs your approach to marketing, especially when combined with the next point…
• How does your audience typically engage in social media? Using the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder, understand how your target audience (as defined by gender, age, and geography) uses social media. Some audience types are not creative and simply want to consume and share content.
• What’s your purpose? Jay Baer calls this your ‘one thing’, Joe Pulizzi (from a content marketing perspective) talks about the intersection between you and your audience.
• How will you be human? Easier for smaller businesses, harder for larger businesses.
• How will you manage social media? Think not only return on investment and KPI’s, but governance and roles and responsibilities, easier again in smaller businesses where there’s far less hierarchy and politics.

Danyl is co-founder of Smart Insights and a digital marketing contractor. His experience spans brand development, direct marketing and digital marketing, with roles both agency and client side over the last 12 years.

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